But the beauty of reading a body of work as extensive and rich as Li’s is that you are able to see how the best novels defy summary. Like all Li’s books, “Goose” does not, as Li describes it, “linger,” because “lingering is for the reader”; it moves unapologetically through time, attuned to the inner workings of its characters while never dwelling on the many violences and losses they experience.
Is there a more universal littoral pursuit than skipping rocks? Russians call it baking pancakes. Czechs throw froggies, while Swedes say they’re tossing sandwiches. Competitors of Japanese mizu kiri, which translates as “cutting water,” are judged not just by a throw’s distance or the number of skips but by its aesthetic beauty.
Ancient Greeks held stone-skipping contests, and Tudor Britons later took it up, calling the pastime “ducks and drakes.” Eighteenth-century priest and scientist Lazzaro Spallanzini determined how stones can push down on the surface of water to generate lift, knowledge humans later employed to kill each other more effectively—first with skipping cannonballs, then with the bouncing bombs invented by British engineer Barnes Wallis to bombard Nazi dams.
But perhaps the greatest power cosmic strings possess is their capacity to confound physicists. According to our best understanding of the early Universe, our cosmos should be riddled with cosmic strings. And yet not a single search has found any evidence for them. Figuring out where the cosmic strings are hiding, or why they shouldn’t exist after all, will help push our understanding of cosmology and fundamental physics to new heights.
Early on, Arthur is told by his former lover, the Pulitzer-winning poet, a kind of secret for success, both as a writer and as a person: “Pay attention. ... That’s all you need to do. Pay attention.” The punch line there is that the world is so full of distractions that Arthur misses the opportunity to do that, or finds himself paying attention to the wrong things. That leads to the moments of misdirection that are the lifeblood of funny novels. But trying to pay attention is touching too: Like writing a novel or finding a happy place to call home, it’s hard, worthy work.
Lucy By the Sea is a chronicle of a plague year — the first year of this ongoing pandemic. It captures its disruptions, uncertainties, and anxieties better than any novel I've read to date on the subject. But because it is also a chronicle of Lucy's growing insights into herself, her family, and their changing relationships during this period of enforced togetherness and separation, it is heartwarming as well as somber.
On a large screen TV my uterus
is projected in a darkened room.
My uterus a shadowy field